Sales, is like any other business activity - it needs planning and training is a key enabler to provide customer-centric financial planning and advisory. To achieve required sales target, there is a need for a certain level and quality of inputs.
A simple calculation: A sales team has 100 feet on street sales people; the firm expects them to meet five prospects a day. If we consider 20 working days a month, the team should have 10,000 sales prospects to work on, and if we look at a worst case scenario of 10% conversion ratio, the team will be able to close 1000 sales cases. If the attendance drops out on a certain day, the number of prospects generated will reduce, to further reduce the number of sales closures.

To ensure best-in-class customer experiences, we enrich our sales teams (field and call center) with timely training interventions, right from the induction programs, to regular refresher training workshops covering sales process, relationship management, portfolio restructuring, and no-obligation financial planning for our clients. Our training methodology uses a mix of classroom sessions, followed by on-field observation by trainers, simulators like real life case studies and role-plays.

Workshops like VALUE (validate, align, leverage, understand, enable) is conducted for our call center executives which include customized training content on equity broking, soft skills, industry best practices, equity dealing insights, situation handling and critical initiatives to gently exceed client expectations, followed by regular call audits and feedback, post the program. This is business critical given our parentage of Temasek Holding & Fullerton Financial Holding from Singapore which requires us to be extremely particular on the compliance and the quality of advice which flows to our clientele through all our business channels, including relationship managers, centralized multi-lingual call center & the other authorized partners.

There are quick review meets in the presence of line managers, where the relationship managers bring their input trackers, capturing the details of total number of prospects approached during the month, total number of sales presentations/meetings during the month, total number of sales closures for the month and follow-up calls/spill over from the current month meetings, for the coming months.
To enhance the domain insight, we are currently working on a detailed training project, on relationship and wealth management skill-building for all our relationship managers, covering advanced financial and solutions planning, spread over the next 3 to 6 months to help them sell better. Even the line managers will take the same course, to have better connect with their respective teams and their sales practices.

Arun Prakash Ray is the Training Head, Fullerton Securities & Wealth Advisors